music and culture from the sahel and sahara

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Monthly Archives: March 2011

A short cd run of Malian centric field recordings that I put together for the USC Africa Health Initiative fundraiser. The image is inspired (and lifted) from the photographs of Seydou Keïta, Malian studio photographer renowned for his use of African fabrics in the compositions.

The trans-cultural exchange in musical phenomena, peripheral to the song as it may be is often at the forefront of discussion. Understandably so. The story of the creation of a style can read like an epic — it appeals to the old folk concept of the passage of music with people, minstrels or migrants. As the world approaches an informatic singularity, the door is thrown open to a barrage of influences. But preferred sound still follows those familiar well trodden tracks, like the one that leads from Mumbai to Kano.

Ziriums (myspace), a hip hop artist at the forefront of the Kano movement (and whose political lyrics have gotten many of the songs banned) explains the Indian sound:

“The number one influence is Indian movies in Northern Nigeria….our parents, our grandparents grew up watching them. In Northern Nigeria all cinemas, play ONLY Indian movies….even now if you go there, they know everything going on in Bollywood..…you know when you listen to something, no matter how much you avoid it and you try to be creative, it’s going to have the feeling of what you were listening to…”

Kano’s Hip Hop is undoubtedly influenced by the massive output from the West. Such that there is a prominent rivalry between the rappers and the Bollywood influenced Nanaye. Even so, the hip hop bears the stylistic signature of Hausa music, never far from India. Ziriums samples include much of the Indian music popular in Kano — including this track, Yanchi Na, which was created from the instrumental of a popular Indian film, Ta Ra Rum Pum and it’s title track “Hey Shona”.

If there is a central motif that immediately stands out when one thinks of Bollywood, it would be the song and dance. There are other common themes — an unrequited love between a hero and girl, an evil villain, and a supporting cast (the bumbling friend, the police “inspector”). In general, the plots are fairly consistent and easy to comprehend. For these amongst other pragmatic and financial reasons, the Bollywood movies are a huge export around the world. Nowhere is this more apparent then in the Hausa region of Northern Nigeria, where Hindi films are a template for local cinematic production and popular music

Plate 13, linked pdf

The most prolific researcher on the subject is Abdalla Uba Adamu (Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria) who traces the influence from the early 1960s, when Lebanese merchants trading in the area began importing Hindi films. Cheap and easy to acquire, they resonated with the population. Culturally conservative with thematic plots of forced marriages or love triangles, the visual motifs translated as well, the actors wearing clothing very similar to that in Kano. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the first homegrown Hausa films appeared, modeled after their Hindi predecessors — including the song and dance routines:

“Indeed in many of the videos, the songs themselves became sub-plots of the main story in which poetic barbs are thrown at each other by the antagonists. Indeed the strongest selling point for a new release of Hausa home video is hinged on a trailer that captures the most captivating song and dance scenes, not the strength of the storyline (which remains the same love triangle in various formations). A Hausa video film without song and dance routines is considered a commercial suicide, or artistic bravado undertaken by few artistes with enough capital to experiment and not bother too much with excessive profit.”

Today, the Hausa film production is a huge industry centered in the Hausa capital of Kano. Boasting some 300 studios, the musical numbers are integral to the films success. The film music is called “Nanaye” — itself a reference to the refrain of playground songs sung by pre-adolescencent girls. The term confers a childish and feminine focus in an otherwise male dominated entertainment industry. If it was a derogatory label, it has since been reclaimed by the producers and performers of the genre.

The film music is immediately recognizable by a consistent library of synth sounds and programmed drum rhythms, as well as the prodigious use of vocal autotune — intended as a pitch correction, but evolved into a trademark sound.